Review: Out of Africa (1985)

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Over the past 40 years, few film genres have fallen out of favour more than the type of middle-brow hits that won big at the Oscars predominantly over the 80s and 90s: Ordinary People. Forrest Gump. Shakespeare in Love. Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa might personify this shifting trend in acclaim more than any other Best Picture winner. In the few occasions it’s mentioned at all, it’s described as a bore: a wooden romantic epic that benefits greatly from its location filming in Kenya. While the Kenyan setting is undoubtedly one of the film’s highlights, Out of Africa plays as a remarkably sturdy, adult film when revisited in the present day.

Out of Africa tells the story of the Danish writer and baroness Karen Blixen (who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen), played by Meryl Streep, who moves to the outskirts of Nairobi in the years preceding World War I. She goes to Kenya with her husband, Baron Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer), whom she marries for convenience rather than romance: she’s rich, he’s a baron, they’re friends, and they’re both getting older without having married anyone else. She is offered a chance for a new life in Kenya, where she starts a coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills and falls in love with a big game hunter, Denys Finch Hatton, played by Robert Redford.

Out of Africa is a romance, but it’s not an overwhelmingly passionate film. Rather, it has a subdued tone. That, along with the colonial setting and literary narration from Karen, give the film textures that have almost entirely disappeared from modern movies. It has some of the dated characteristics of this period of middlebrow entertainment. For instance, it hardly shows much interest in the African characters, who remain on the periphery in favour of white protagonists who use Africa as a handsome backdrop to their melodrama.

But even this critique ignores the fact that this mirrors how the real-life Karen was never able to bridge her own divide with her adopted homeland. Her inability to connect to her African workers is an essential part of her character, just as is her inability to coexist alongside Danish aristocrats. She doesn’t belong, no matter where she is, so she searches for security as a perpetual outsider. This feeling of loneliness eventually leads her to write (two of her most famous works, “The Immortal Story” and “Babette’s Feast,” were both adapted into popular movies), which captures something fundamentally true about the art of writing: it primarily appeals to outsiders.

The opening moments of a good film always teach you how to watch what follows and Out of Africa has a stylistically provocative opening, even if the narrative framework is conventional. It starts with the image of the African savannah, the sun low on the horizon, followed by first-person views of something flitting through tall grass. We see an elderly Karen anguishing in bed and cut back to the savannah where a silhouetted man stands in the distance. Karen speaks of this man and we get scattered narration referring to events we haven’t seen take place yet. We see and hear key glimpses of Karen’s past, but our future as viewers: Mozart’s “Concerto for Clarinet & Orchestra in A,” a golden pen, a plane ride over the savannah. We hear with foreboding about “Tsavo” and learn that this man has haunted Karen like no other.

The flurry of memory slows down as Karen realizes she ought to start at the beginning and the film then gradually unfolds to reveal the mystery of these images and these events. The approach imbues what comes after—Karen’s marriage to Bror, move to Nairobi, and falling in love with Denys— with a surprising amount of tension, but also tenderness. This relationship was central to Karen’s life, but it’s ambiguous as to why it matters so much. Pollack treats this as the central mystery to reveal over the film’s generous two hours and 40 minutes, but he never fully resolves the mystery. Even once the film reaches its conclusion, what bonds Karen and Denys is never truly dissected so as to resolve any doubts. In fact, the film shares Karen Blixen’s belief as a writer that people are not fully knowable: you can reveal aspects of their core, but never the whole.

Out of Africa shares this ambiguous approach in many aspects of its style: shots are often medium long to not only feature more of the stunning geography, but also to keep us at a distance from these figures. We align with Karen because of her narration, but the camera does not assume a familiarity. Rather, it watches her with curiosity from a respectful distance. The ambiguity also shows up in the central performances of Streep, Redford, and Brandauer. Brandaeur’s Bror is revealed to be something of a cad, but a brave man as well; he never truly descends into stereotype. Redford is more subdued, aloof. He’s never an actor who truly disappears into a role and here he’s as much a physical presence as an emotional one. Redford is famously handsome and even though he’s noticeably older than Streep here, he retains his youthful grace and calm. It’s not necessarily a great performance, but Redford’s quiet confidence and dignity becomes totemic in the film: he represents the chance for peace that Karen has been searching for her whole life. Which is ironic, because Denys is a game hunter and prone to acting recklessly.

Of course, the ambiguity is best captured in Streep’s performance as Karen. Streep struggles with mastering the Danish accent, but her performance is fascinating, vacillating between indifference and passion, anger and steely reserve. There are a few moments of histrionics; in fact, the most passionate moment is not the culmination of her love affair with Denys, but rather her driving off a hungry lion that attacks her herd of prized cattle. She approaches things with passion, but never opens herself up to others, except Denys, and even him, only fleetingly. The narration lets us into her mind, but even then, she withholds, as if she’s worried about coming off the wrong way to the unknown viewer hearing her words. Pollack’s comfort with ambivalence and a subdued tone makes the film feel truly classical; the past 40 years since its release might as well be 100, as it feels more of the spirit of the time it depicts than the time it was made, let alone any of the conventions of the 2020s.

Perhaps my description of the film confirms its reputation as being wooden, but there are two obvious elements that bring the film’s beauty and energy to the fore. The first is the setting, which almost doesn’t need to be remarked upon, but must be. Out of Africa is in love with the Kenyan landscape: the red earth, the acacia trees, the dancing sunsets. But it also captures the danger of this world and how it bridges the domestic and the wild in ways that Karen, and all Europeans, truly cannot fathom. She domesticates the land with a farm, but it’s a farm where lions roam and cattle fall prey to the mightiest predators on the planet. Quiet moments of beauty such as a country ride on horseback turn deadly in a moment, as Karen comes across a hunting lioness. Few films capture the danger and beauty of a different land like Out of Africa does. The use of real animals and real locations also makes it palpable; the danger feels real.

The other element is John Barry’s music, which is the best work of his career. Barry’s James Bond 007 theme remains his most iconic work, but Monty Norman actually wrote the theme and no matter how good Barry’s scores are for the films—and they are good—his work on Out of Africa is so achingly romantic and sad. It captures the mournful tone of this film so well; like all great scores, it embodies the emotions better than any words can. It remains the most notable element of a very good film that has fallen out of favour as tastes change and conventions are upended. But popular opinion is rarely correct. Out of Africa remains an interesting, effective work. It’s something of an artifact, and all the more compelling for it.

8 out of 10

Out of Africa (1985, USA)

Directed by Sydney Pollack; written by Kurt Luedtke, based on Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Story Teller by Judith Thurman, and Silence Will Speak by Errol Trzebinski; starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Michael Kitchen, Shane Rimmer.

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